Match Preview: Birmingham Bears v Gloucestershire
1 September 2020
Gloucestershire travel to Birmingham tomorrow to take on the Bears with hopes of coming home with back to back away victories.
Gloucestershire’s T20 record on their travels has been remarkable in recent times with four wins in their last five outings. Wins against top teams Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Worcestershire have shown The Shire’s ability to compete with the top teams in the country.
Richard Dawson isn’t looking for much from his team, just to be consistent.
“The biggest challenge we have right now is to repeat our performance against Worcestershire. You’re always looking to develop and for ways to improve but first and foremost we need to maintain a high standard over a period of games and not just as a once off.
“We’ve set a standard and that’s what we have to now try and match or better. I’m not too worried about the points, it’s about the performance and if you play well the points will look after themselves.”
The top order all performed well against the Rapids, Dent top scoring with 60 and his fourth half-century in T20 cricket. Miles Hammond was the anchor of the innings lasting until the 15th over and allowing Dent and Cockbain to be the aggressors at the opposite end.
Jack Taylor and Ryan Higgins closed out the innings with a partnership of 58 and looked threatening throughout, Taylor taking advantage of a free ball by sending the ball into the Premier Inn carpark.
Tom Smith and Graeme van Buuren bowled very impressively in the middle overs stemming the flow of the Rapids and taking some crucial wickets of Wessels, Haynes and Libby.
Gloucestershire have named an unchanged squad to travel to Birmingham:
The Bears are in action tonight in the Vitality Blast against the Northants Steelbacks who have won two of two matches.
Birmingham started their campaign with a six wicket win over Glamorgan at Sophia Gardens. Only two Glamorgan batsmen made more than 10 runs with a 72 off 56 from Chris Cooke the saving grace on what could have been a very underwhelming score.
Bresnan and Stone were impressive in Cardiff taking five wickets between them and Jake Lintott only allowed 13 runs from his allotment. Jeetan Patel also made his return playing his first match of the year and taking one wicket.
The Birmingham batsmen recovered from a second ball wicket of Pollock with impressive knocks from Bell, Hose and Hain. Much like Gloucestershire’s innings, a strong partnership led them home with five overs to go.
Speaking on whether he would be watching the match this evening Dawson said:
“I will try to watch it and if I don’t catch it today, I will make sure I do tomorrow morning. Watching other teams you can see patterns in a way a batsman scores and the variations a bowler uses.
“We feed that back to the players if we can but you still have to go out and play the match, there are different conditions every day and you have to perform in the circumstances that you are given.”
The match is being broadcast on Sky Sports and is scheduled to begin at 6:30pm. You can follow all of the action via the Gloscricket social media channels.
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